With a short light rod, a good silk line, and an English hook attached to fine gut, I have enjoyed many a good hour’s sport at Parewah.  I used to have a cane chair sent down to the bank of the stream, a punkah, or hand fan, plenty of cooling drinks, and two coolie boys in attendance to remove the fish, renew baits, and keep the punkah in constant swing.  There I used to sit enjoying my cigar, and pulling in little fish at the rate sometimes of a couple a minute.

I remember hooking a turtle once, and a terrible job it was to land him.  My light rod bent like a willow, but the tackle was good, and after ten minutes’ hard work I got the turtle to the side, where my boys soon secured him.  He weighed thirteen pounds.  Sometimes you get among a colony of freshwater crabs.

They are little brown brutes, and strip your hooks of the bait as fast as you fling them in.  There is nothing for it in such a case but to shift your station.  Many of the bottom fish—­the ghurai, the saourie, the barnee (eel), and others, make no effort to escape the hook.  You see them resting at the bottom, and drop the bait at their very nose.  On the whole, the hand fishing is uninteresting, but it serves to wile away an odd hour when hunting and shooting are hardly practicable.

Particular occupations in India are restricted to particular castes.  All trades are hereditary.  For example, a tatmah, or weaver, is always a weaver.  He cannot become a blacksmith or carpenter.  He has no choice.  He must follow the hereditary trade.  The peculiar system of land-tenure in India, which secures as far as possible a bit of land for every one, tends to perpetuate this hereditary selection of trades, by enabling every cultivator to be so far independent of his handicraft, thus restricting competition.  There may be twenty lohars, or blacksmiths, in a village, but they do not all follow their calling.  They till their lands, and are de facto petty farmers.  They know the rudiments of their handicraft, but the actual blacksmith’s work is done by the hereditary smith of the village, whose son in turn will succeed him when he dies, or if he leave no son, his fellow caste men will put in a successor.

Nearly every villager during the rains may be found on the banks of the stream or lake, angling in an amateur sort of way, but the fishermen of Behar par excellence are the mull[=a]hs; they are also called Gouhree, Beeu, or Muchooah.  In Bengal they are called Nikaree, and in some parts Baeharee, from the Persian word for a boat.  In the same way muchooah is derived from much, a fish, and mullah means boatman, strictly speaking, rather than fisherman.  All boatmen and fishermen belong to this caste, and their villages can be recognised at once by the instruments of their calling lying all around.